Beating politeness to a pulp: a clash of tastes

Good taste is all very well, but it's worse than useless as a shield against the blood-and-guts passion of the egotistical film director Quentin Tarantino

Tarantino can't be restrained by anything so flimsy as mere good taste Photograph:Michael Mariant
There’s tasteful pleasure, which is an adult speciality: pruning the roses may
be a source for some; listening to Radio 4 for others. And then, of course,
there’s full-throttle fun. It requires a higher level of commitment (I
vaguely remember); a tasteless lack of restraint, for example; a hint of
danger, maybe even a promise of anarchy… Children know this instinctively,
the lucky things. Adults, on the other hand, seem to want to forget. And the
older, more educated, older and tasteful we are, the more forgetful we
become.

So there I was, not long ago, restrained and forgetful, as befits my age and
education, in search of some unthreatening pleasure. I waddled off to a
smart event at the Bafta theatre in Piccadilly: Alfred Dunhill Bafta — A
Life in Pictures, it was called. Which name hardly slips off the pen. But so
sought-after were the tickets to this evening